Every industry has its own argot, often incorporating a specialized symbology that is foreign to the uninitiated. Investors speak the language of ticker symbols, short sequences of letters that uniquely identify each particular stock. From “A” (Agilent Technologies) to “Z” (Zillow Group), every publicly traded stock, mutual fund and ETF carries its own designated symbol.
With roughly 30,000 different symbols in use in the U.S. alone, some are easily recognizable (IBM, GM, GE), while some are inscrutable (X for U.S. Steel).
So how did we end up with this thicket of cryptic symbols?
Formalized stock trading traces its origin to 1792, when 24 investors established a rudimentary exchange under a buttonwood tree in New York City. By 1817, the “Buttonwood Agreement” had evolved into the New York Stock Exchange. Prior to electronic communications, transaction reports were hand-carried by courier or posted via the mails.
Christopher HopkinsShortly after the Civil War, Edward Calahan modified a standard telegraph to transmit stock transactions over a wire to a remote machine that printed the information onto thin paper tapes. By 1868, another enterprising telegrapher, Thomas Edison, perfected the device and made it commercially viable (Edison’s first significant invention). The device emitted a distinct ticking sound, and soon “stock tickers” could be heard clacking away in dozens of brokers’ offices.